Friday, 20 January 2012

Hotel Excelsior, Berlin

This is a follow-up to a post from last March on the subject of the Anhalter Bahnhof and the Hotel Excelsior, Berlin bei Nacht. Europe’s largest station and Europe’s largest hotel were connected by a pedestrian tunnel that ran underneath Askanischer Platz. Today we have some artist’s impressions of the underground connection found in a publicity brochure from the Hotel Excelsior. The tunnel opened in 1929 and sealed the Excelsior’s reputation as the most modern hotel in Berlin. The convenience of a seamless transition from train to hotel transformed the fortunes of what had been an ailing facility. The illustrations present an exciting subterranean world in which the great and the good could insulate themselves from the great unwashed, untroubled by the need to queue for a ticket having made use of the rail ticket desk in the hotel foyer. The end came in April 1945 when Allied bombs destroyed the Excelsior – it never re-opened and was finally demolished in 1954. The fate of the tunnel is unknown – perhaps it remains intact, awaiting rediscovery at some point in the future.